USF Service-Learning on Clipper Cove

USF Orientation Sail

USF Service-Learning Team Orientation Sail on Clipper Cove

Last Friday three students from  USF’s Service-Learning program delivered recommendations for a volunteer tracking app for integration with our salesforce.com platform. Complete with requirements, objective and solution pros/cons.  Their next step – deliver documented phase-1 of a working, deployable system.

Service-learning at USF offers motivated students an opportunity to work on a range of projects while developing valuable experience rooted to real-world constraints. The community partner benefits are many, including ability to expand resources available for key projects, access to latest thinking and technology and effective way to development additional skills within their teams. Big win-win all around

Next steps for USF team: to provide a “cheat sheet” for those features we need (the system has many more bells and whistles than we require) then populate new app with real data. Final phase will be roll out and guiding TISC team through use on live volunteer project.

TISC could not function without our volunteers. They provide needed skills, hundreds of hours of applied time each year and gifts-in-kind for major events. More important, many grants are tied to our non-profit status; if we cannot show documented volunteer hours some of them would disappear of our radarscope.

Thanks to USF efforts we will soon have a cloud-based system to enable our team to easily set up and promote volunteer projects then track and report volunteer hours quickly and efficiently.  Our tenants will benefit through an easy path to match their time and skills to projects available to fulfill their contract commitments to TISC. Another big win-win.

TISC teaches life skills to kids through sailing. USF service-learning provides a unique opportunity for students to deliver vital services to the community around them while tuning their basic job skills so important in the workspace they will soon join.

I look forward to meeting our entire USF team in a couple of weeks – they’ll be joining us for our Opening Day on Saturday, April 27th.

Regards from On the Cove, Dave G

In the wake: If you’re interested in learning more about USF service learning you might want to consider joining one of their bi-annual Community Partner Seminars